


official logbook: ct-5381

by seraf



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Diary/Journal, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Isolation, Kamino, Medical Experimentation, Medical Torture, POV First Person, Suicide Attempt, Touch-Starved, it's dogma's journal please dont let the first person turn you off
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-15
Updated: 2018-08-03
Packaged: 2019-05-23 12:20:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14934170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraf/pseuds/seraf
Summary: something to be said for kamino: if i had died in the days where i was stuck there, i would never have noticed. there was just that omnipresent white, and the paralytic working its way out of my body, and the low thrum of pain - it took me three days as it was to realize that i wasn’t strapped down anymore.( that was when the medical droid came in, impartially tested my blood and turned me over like i was an inconvenient rug it needed to sweep over. it cleaned up where i’d pissed myself, and left again. i realized that it had turned me over, and also that there wasn’t a bedpan there anymore - i hadn’t had anything but nutrition injections or an iv for months now, so my body didn’t have much to give up, anyway. )---a journal, from dogma's pov, about what happened after he was taken away.





	1. Chapter 1

something to be said for kamino: if i had died in the days where i was stuck there, i would never have noticed. there was just that omnipresent white, and the paralytic working its way out of my body, and the low thrum of pain - it took me three days as it was to realize that i wasn’t strapped down anymore.

 

( that was when the medical droid came in, impartially tested my blood and turned me over like i was an inconvenient rug it needed to sweep over. it cleaned up where i’d pissed myself, and left again. i realized that it _had_ turned me over, and also that there wasn’t a bedpan there anymore - i hadn’t had anything but nutrition injections or an iv for months now, so my body didn’t have much to give up, anyway. )

 

even after i realized i wasn’t strapped down, or paralyzed anymore, it took me even longer to actually move again, like my body had _forgotten._ why bother struggling, when it got you nowhere, only brought more pain, and there was no dignity to it?

 

( i _tried,_ of course i did, some of the worse days, but all i could ever manage was rocking from side to side slightly and trying to cross my arms over my chest to no avail. )

 

( i figured that i might’ve become dar’manda anyway, for what i had done. maybe i didn’t even have the right to fight back against it anymore, didn’t have the right to try and be mandokarla or claim that i was trying to stay true to being a trooper or mando’ad by fighting back. it doesn’t make sense, but nothing really felt like it did, then. )

 

the first thing i managed to do was roll onto my stomach, and almost an hour later, prop myself up with my arms a little, before i collapsed and just lay there. it felt like i was having to learn to walk all over again - pushing myself into a crawl, using the wall to slowly stand up, and eventually being able to stagger across the room.

 

my body didn’t feel _right._ it still doesn’t, not really. like they took something important out and jumbled up everything inside and tossed in a few pieces of their own - it’s not my body, anymore. i just happen to be here.

 

( maybe it’s because i was supposed to die. maybe like the jedi and the mando’ade believe, my body and my spirit-soul-whatever makes me _me_ had already seperated, and the kaminoans just forced us back together unnaturally. )


	2. Chapter 2

one of my vod’e asked me how i didn’t just go crazy in there.

 

i’ve got two answers for that, really:

 

one simply being that i’m not sure i _didn’t._

 

the second being - they wanted me to. if i showed that i was completely unfit for the field, they could override skywalker and rex’s executive order of sorts to draft me back into torrent eventually and just send me back to the donors. so i _couldn’t._

 

let me describe the room to you: it was sterile and white, like the rest of kamino, except a small third of the room done in silver, with the ‘fresher - a toilet bowl and a showerhead that would extend out twice a day for me if i wanted to. the entire room was about fifteen paces by twenty paces, the silver part being twenty by five of it. i counted. there was a small mirror built into the ‘fresher wall. there was a small rack on one wall that served as a bed, and two doors and three rayshields set up between me and _out._

 

i showered twice a day. i was given nutrition injections once every three days. the sink slid out from the wall every - two hours, maybe? so i could hydrate if need be. every two nutrition injections, they’d take my blood, do a vitals check, leave again - the medical droid, pressing the needle into my arm, the stethoscope to my chest, and then leaving, was the closest thing i had to contact or socialization. sometimes it would even respond to me, and even if it was just to tell me _ct-5381, please remain still_ or some variation, it was about the only thing that made me feel real, sometimes.

 

i don’t know what they did, there, but there was something they rubbed into my hair, shaving it short, and over my fingernails, every two sessions the droid checked my vitals, and - my hair, my nails, didn’t grow. it burned like all hell, but i think it was for convenience’s sake. they didn’t want me anywhere around something i could use as a weapon, either against them somehow, or to off myself - they were fine with me dying, of course, but only if _they_ had control over it.

 

still, my nails were long enough to draw blood.

 

( i found that out, too. )

 

there’s only so much you can do to stay grounded, to convince yourself you’re _real,_ when there’s no contact with the outside world and you can’t see time pass on your face or with any chrono or anything like that, and i suppose i found my way. they didn’t care if i tore my arms or thighs up - my nails weren’t sharp enough to _really_ do too much damage, so it never bothered them. if anything, for them it was a victory, a sign i _couldn’t_ go back on the field.

 

( i’ve spent the last few months learning about psychology, and i _know_ that it’s stuck around in part because it’s an addictive habit, and it’s not _really_ my fault i’m having trouble breaking out of the pattern, but that doesn’t really help things in the end. it doesn’t even convince _me,_ really. )

 

so there was that to do. i’d sleep when i could, when i was exhausted enough that i didn’t care anymore what would show up in my dreams. i’d be tired enough that i’d roll to sleep and he’d be looming over me again, in the cell next to mine, and _laughing,_ and i’d just lie with my back to the wall and sleep again.

 

i’d talk, just - saying everything i’d committed to memory. some of the regs they made us read every day, the names of all the brothers i knew, the vode an, every swear word i knew in mando’a, fives’ speech up against the wall, the terms of my sentence. just words, to fill up the space and the silence - even if it all came from me, sometimes i _had_ to have the noise, or i would have lost it. it gave me something to do.

 

there was my pacing and measurements - see how long around the ‘fresher bowl is in pointer finger lengths, how many paces around the room, how many palm-lengths the sink was, and if i could double-check that before it slid back into the wall.

 

there was exercise, sometimes - the room was too small to jog in, but once my stitches had healed some and i’d learned to ignore the burning pain in my spine, i started doing sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, planks, until my body would give out under me again.

 

sometimes i’d talk to myself.

 

yeah, i know how that sounds. but i wasn’t . . . really talking to myself. the one thing about being a clone is that if you squint hard enough at the mirror, or stare for so long unblinking that your eyes water up and blur, it could be any one of your friends or family looking back at you.

 

tup. and telling him that i was sorry, and that he’d been the best of our batch all along. kix, asking him how the different wounded were doing since umbara, and what the shinies had gotten up to lately. cody, asking about some of the escapades of his general recently. rex, and telling him i was sorry. crease and nine-eight and pip, asking them what they would have done if _they_ survived - if it should have been them that lived this far, not me.

 

and jango, sometimes. i never met him, not really. but i’d ask if he was - it would depend on the day, but i’d either ask if he was proud of me or ashamed.

 

of course, it’s not like they answered. i don’t know whether that’s for better or for worse.

 

you know, i wanted to kill myself, then. though i’m not sure how much that’s changed - the first couple of times i tried were before i was even brought back to kamino. credit to my medic for me making it here. i think kix guessed it was a possibility for me. fiddled with all the guns in a fifteen-room radius, replaced the heat packs with stuns.

 

did you know that if you press a gun loaded only with stuns under your chin and pull the trigger, the barrel of the gun still needs to heat to fire off the shot, and as a result, the metal barrel leaves a circular burn, as well as knocking you out cold? i do, now.

 

( it feels like anyone, looking closely enough, could tell that my life is only very tenuously connected to this plane. )

 

there were a couple people who i would occasionally meet, who would come through my cell. two droids. one was called eefi ( their number was e-51493s2, but it’d been nicknamed eefi by the vod’e ) and the other dv-921. eefi was . . . almost _friendly,_ for a droid. it would stay a little longer and talk, seemingly knowing that it was good to just hear something that wasn’t my own voice. dv wasn’t - it would give me the nutrition injection or take my blood and be gone as soon as it came.

 

there was a vod. i only saw him twice, and he was reconditioned - there was a terrifying blankness behind his eyes, and he moved like a machine. i asked him what his name was, and he gave me a number without expression, continuing in his work.

 

i won’t say his number here. it’s not important. our numbers aren’t _people,_ and i don’t want to reveal who he might have been before they took that away from him.

 

and of course, there was nala se - she’d only ever be visible through the door, jotting down notes impartially, having sent in the medical droid to prod at me and scrolling down a checkup list on her holo, before leaving. she didn’t come often, but i think . . . she found me distasteful. a waste of limited resources, now that i wasn’t even a donor, wasn’t even helping the war effort with the last shreds of my body.

 

little gods, what else did i do?

 

i’d talk - not to anyone, but i’d say everything i remembered. as many of the regs as i could, the different mando’a chants we’d learned in history or to help ourselves concentrate, the fett clan family line, the words of the vode an, every speech we’d been given by the alpha arcs, just anything i could do to fill the silent space up with words and kill some time. it got to the point where there were a few times i was just lying on the floor saying the alphabet to myself over and over because i didn’t want to succumb to the silence.


	3. Chapter 3

when they took me out, i thought i was just finally going to my execution, you know?

 

they cuffed me, and there was a guard of six brothers with nala se, and i was led into a small - not room, even, just a door off the main hall. no one spoke to me. no one told me what we were doing or what they meant to do to me, and i was resigned to it being my death. they strapped me down to a stretcher, and nala se removed a hypo and pushed it into the side of my neck with a calculating expression.

 

my body started to go numb, and my eyelids felt heavy, darkness slowly beginning to wash over my field of vision, and the last thought i had was that dying this way wasn’t as bad as i could’ve gone.

 

and then i woke up, with my hands uncuffed, lying on a stretcher in medbay - they’d just sedated me to move me back over to the resolute.

 

i didn’t move. it’s going to sound ridiculous, now, but my first thought was that this was the manda. marching far away, after all. wouldn’t it make sense that in the fight continuing, it would be the same equipment, the same medbays, that we’d been used to in life? and i had to be dead. that was the only thing that made sense to me, then. for some of what i had done, i deserved it, and in the eyes of the republic, for the thing i’d done i _didn’t_ regret, i deserved it even more.

 

the republic doesn’t care about our lives or us as individuals. everything i’ve known was telling me that i should be dead. i was an inconvenience at best, and a traitor at worst.

 

and kix walked in, and said hello nonchalantly, picking up a stethescope, and i asked him how he’d died.

 

he asked me if i was hallucinating, which, all considered, was a reasonable question. genuinely, i’m not sure if i ever started, on kamino - there were times when i’d see my face in the mirror really _as_ jango or as tup or so on, or when i didn’t fill the silence, my brain would start to make up noise to fill it anyway. so i’m not sure that me hallucinating was that big a jump in logic.

 

me: i guess i’d have to be. i’m seeing you, after all.

 

him: you got _pardoned,_ dogma. welcome back to torrent.

 

me: i suppose i _am_ hallucinating.

 

he reached over and pinched my arm, and asked if that felt like a hallucination, and i told him that i wouldn’t know, i hadn’t ever really hallucinated before, and he looked - he gave me that medic look, like you’re _just_ on the verge of rolling your eyes, but you have to be patient for your patient.

 

me: you’re at least a convincing one. you act almost like the real kix.

 

he was offended by that, i think. crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow and told me he _was_ the real kix, and i didn’t have the energy in me to tell him that had to be impossible. just sagged and lay back down on the stretcher. he didn’t _leave,_ though, and after a few minutes of silence, i told him that i should be dead.

 

just that, just that simply. ‘ i should be dead. ‘

 

i couldn’t really see him from where i was lying, but i could hear him sigh, and he walked over to me and smoothed my hair down, and told me to get some rest.

 

it was like flipping a switch in me, somewhere. it was a simple gesture for him, but it was the first human contact i’d had in - what, eight, nine months? a solid year? he touched my hair, and something small and curled up in my chest screamed like a wounded animal, and i just started to cry, leaning into the touch like a stray dog. i guess i never really understood the expression ‘touch starved’ until now, but then i understood it viscerally.

 

like a man who’d gone without food for a month and a half and was on the brink of death by starvation, so used to being hungry that his body doesn’t recognize food when he’s given it, doesn’t recognize anymore that it _is_ hungry, because that’s just the state of being.

 

i was lonely, and i craved touch, and that hadn’t really hit me until kix touched me, simple and fleeting, and the dam burst.

 

i don’t really remember what happened in between, just that kix was suddenly there, cradling me like a lost cadet, and i was sobbing so hard that my lungs ached, that i couldn’t breathe except in short, shallow gasps, and i was holding onto him like a life preserver. i was afraid that if i let go, he would leave, and i would be brutally, suddenly alone again. and i think i knew that if i was, it would kill me. that sounds like an exaggeration, but it would.

 

but he didn’t leave. he stayed and just held me, chin propped to the top of my head and arms wrapped around me, and i didn’t _understand._ when i had left, you see, the fact that i had been the one to shoot krell was still incredibly confidential. only rex, fives, and jesse knew, and that’s because they’d been there. in everyone else’s eyes, i was still just the traitor who’d led that firing squad.

 

that had changed, but i didn’t know that. _couldn’t_ know that. and i didn’t understand why he’d hold a traitor.


	4. Chapter 4

this part i think i can only write out in the third person. when i remember it as . . . me, i suppose, everything becomes a little bit blurrier. which i'm not sure says too much about my relative sanity during this time, but - i guess that's how it is, you know? 

i mentioned before that i'd . . . basically hold conversations with myself, imagining my reflection as someone else who shared my face. here's one - i wrote it when i got off kamino, actually, which. considering some recent updates, it's a bit ironic, rereading it. especially interacting with fett junior after all this. 

anyway. 

 

* * *

 

 

‘ all we have is yours, ‘ dogma says quietly to him, jango’s face remaining impassive. ‘ everything that makes us  _us._ our genes, our armor, our language, our values, our skills, our stories, our accents. it’s all yours. ‘

dogma is eight years old. ( dogma, by republic standards, is a clone trooper, and therefore, even if he was still four or thirteen or six, he would be tried as a clone, and often killed like one. )

‘ would you be proud of me? ‘ he asks jango, and there’s no response, dogma blinking quickly to prevent his eyes from stinging. he’s … too young, really, to have ever met their original. all he has is a fleeting memory once, of legs too short to walk without falling, and running straight into a massive leg, and a man who picked him up - at the time, he’d thought it was one of his brothers. 

the man had run a hand over his curly hair and called him  _verd’ika,_ little soldier, and told him to always keep his eyes forwards. 

that’s all dogma has. they don’t have fathers or mothers or homes; dogma has a growth tube now being used to grow a new embryonic clone, and a fleeting baby-memory of a man he never saw again, and his battered armor, in 501st blue. and even  _that_ belongs to jango in some extent - the 501st was the  _initial_ clone company, first led by alpha-17. their armor color is based off of jango’s beskar’gem. 

dogma hopes he would be proud of him. 

( sometimes, on worse days, where he hasn’t left the corner of his cell or he’s clawed at the skin of his arms to the point of bleeding again, he thinks he’d just settle for  _anyone_ being proud of him, these days. )

‘ do you think, ‘ he starts, and hesitates, his voice shaking. ‘ do you think i’m a failure, or that just my actions are? ‘ he’s looking down, avoiding meeting jango’s eyes. ‘ do you think i even  _deserve_ a second chance? ‘ 

jango doesn’t answer. 

dogma wasn’t really expecting him to. 

he sighs and blinks, and jango is gone. dogma presses his fingertips to the surface of the mirror softly, exhaling. he might have jango’s face, but he doesn’t have any of the answers his progenitor might be able to give. 

he’s looking away from the glass, turning on the water and beginning to wash his face. 


	5. Chapter 5

come to think of it, i never actually talked about what happened in the donor rooms here, yet.

 

someone in the press recently caught wind of it, i remember, and described it as torture, and i really had to disagree - torture, on some level, is personal. there’s some emotion involved in the process on both sides. they _want_ to hurt you, or to scare you.

 

this was far too . . . removed? impersonal? to be torture. they didn’t want to hurt me, but that was the cause and effect - that was just an unfortunate side effect.

 

kaminoans are naturally venemous, producing a mild paralytic. for those in the donor rooms, they simply take that paralytic and concentrate it, rendering the victim completely paralyzed. but _not,_ however, incapable of feeling - it’s not a sedative or analgesic. the thing they worried about is whether or not you’d be easy to take apart, not whether the process would hurt you.

 

i’m half-convinced the paralytic also causes an amount of pain, as well - it is a neurotoxin, attacking the nervous system, so it would make sense if it also affected the pain receptors.

 

anyway. that’s - what they did, more or less.

 

strapped me down to a stretcher and stuck a needle in my arm, and i didn’t know enough yet to close my eyes before they did that - they were open for so long, i nearly went blind. i know some of the vod’e bred for this _did._ and they tugged me into a room sterile and white as the rest of it, and took - i think two and a half liters? of blood from me, and half a liter of plasma.

 

and then a medical droid was hovering over my chest, and - i believe inserted a needle into my upper pelvic bone? it was my first marrow donation, at any rate. i wish i could have fought back, or screamed, even, but i couldn’t even blink. just . . . sit there as it retrieved what it wanted and moved down to the next brother in the line of stretchers.

 

my first surgery was - hells if i know when it was, actually. we had no way of telling time, there. just nutrition injections and surgeries and occasional periods of exhausted, painful, stolen sleep.

 

but they took one of my lungs out of my chest, and i watched them do it, and i watched them attach new cells to the place where they’d cut, prepared to grow another - and maybe in time they’d take that one, too. and i watched them impassively stich my chest back together, and roll over the stiches with bacta.

 

we were trained not to faint or flinch at gore. as a soldier and as a combat medic, i don’t feel queasy at the sight of infection or a vod whose arm from the elbow down just isn’t _there_ anymore or a natborn officer pissing themselves and trying to hold their stomach shut, crying out for their parents.

 

but that doesn’t really prepare you for seeing your own chest cut open, and it _certainly_ doesn’t for feeling it.

 

it’s incredible to say, but you get used to it.

 

they would take marrow or blood or plasma almost daily, and sometimes they would cut my torso open, take something out, and sew me back together again like i was a child’s stuffed toy.

 

they state that the vod’e bred for the donation chambers are incapable of higher thought, but i know that’s wrong for a few reasons. one - the first thing that the paralytic would wear off of would be the eyelids and fingertips. we had a sort of simple code to state things like when the kaminoans were coming, if it was just a droid, how many withdrawals left before we got nutrition injections.

 

second, i saw some of them come in.

 

cadets, about six, all of them - about three batches. maybe about - fourteen? with shaved heads and scared eyes, walking in here. one of them stopped to ask the kaminii with them about something. one of them was humming to themselves. and one tried to fight it, tried to knock over a tray and run for it, just to get dragged back kicking to an empty stretcher.

 

soon enough all of them were strapped down and motionless. it was like being in a morgue, sometimes, with the smell of chemicals and blood and the bodies lying in rows upon rows.


	6. Chapter 6

there’s no chronological order to this, and for that i really am sorry. it’s . . . mostly a way to help me organize my thoughts. it’s easier to process some of this like that. putting it down on holo means that it actually happened. that maybe there’s a chance someone else _knows._

 

in part i just . . . want people to understand. i can’t . . . speak it, out loud, in reply to any question as to why i’m like this. but . . . if they read this, i know they at least understand part of it, right? they at least know the cause to the effect.

 

anyway.

 

being in the 501st wasn’t a great start, either - i was . . . _meant_ to be shadowing fives. and for awhile that worked out fine. i reported to him and to rex, and once to general skywalker, who smiled at me, told me to get some rest.

 

little gods and fish, i was a stupid little shiny back then.

 

i could almost feel myself wavering on my feet from exhaustion - running back and forth, double-checking the platoon reports, trying to help whereever i could, and my back hurt now, from trying to stand up so straight i practically fell backwards. i tried to make myself sound more professional, tried to make my voice sound deeper.

 

( it turned out to be the wrong thing, anyway. )

 

the general told me to sleep, and i automatically said that i was fine, and rex clarified, not meanly, that _the general is giving you an_ order, _dogma._ i snapped something out quickly and high-tailed it back to the position where i was - alone, mostly. tup was with the people he was shadowing, hardcase and jesse, and fives and rex were right up front with the general, so i was alone where i slept, clutching my gun like a cadet does their comfort object.

 

when i woke up, we were being attacked, and i missed getting an umbaran blaster charge to the throat by _just_ enough that i could feel the heat of it as it shot past my blacks.

 

and we _fought._

 

umbara would have been a shitty first trek even without everything that went down with krell. i’m the reservist medic for the 501st. you couldn’t leave the wounded men for an instant, or the banshees would fly down and begin to strip their meat from their bones while they were still alive. kix and i could only save so many, someone always having to stay back with their deecee in hand to make sure the ones we’d already tried to save weren’t for naught.

 

it was . . . jarring. there was a vod in front of me, up with captain rex, who fell with a hole through his back, and the captain didn’t even pause - told me to take up his position, flank the enemy from the left.

 

so i did. i’ve always been good at following orders, after all.

 

there was a mine that went off, and it wasn’t until we were settled down at the enemy airbase and i peeled off my armor that i realized the side of one leg had been torn to all hell by shrapnel. shock is an amazing thing.

 

one of my first jobs on the airbase was to interrogate the umbaran prisoners. ugly work. we’d all been _taught_ tactics to get information from someone who doesn’t want to give it, of course, and had most of them practiced _on_ us. but i think every brother quietly hopes to never utilize those skills.

 

hardcase managed to get out of it, so it was just me, standing defiant in my blue-and-white armor, trying to get answers.

 

( answers that proved to be just about meaningless, anyway. of course they didn’t tell me about the sabotaged transmitter - they had never been the ones to do it. )


	7. Chapter 7

this isn’t . . . particularly about any events. if you’re here for more of the horror story of kamino, this chapter is one you can skip over. but first and foremost, this was meant to be a logbook for my thoughts, for the times i can actually remember to write down what i feel rather than just let it pass by.

 

( there are only seven entries in here, and i’ve certainly been distressed more than seven times, so you can see, really, how good i am at that. )

 

recovery isn’t _fast enough._

 

i know it’s a process that’s meant to take awhile, and i know that there are going to be setbacks. but it feels like for every step i take forwards, i take one backwards as well - twice the effort, and i end up going nowhere.

 

and i’m worried my vod’e are going to get tired of it, you know? it doesn’t help that i haven’t . . . _got_ anyone, here. ( i’m on the coruscant guard now, by the way, but that’s a story in and of itself. ) torrent is gone. my squadmates here have dissolved one by one, and i’m . . . alone.

 

gods, i’d willingly spend another year on kamino if it meant i never had to feel alone again.

 

it’s the sort of thing that sticks with you, you know? i’m sure it’s just a mild nagging for some, but i’ve . . . always been alone. i was the odd one out in cadet groups, and in our batch, and when we joined torrent, it proved to be the same one.

 

_here comes dogma._

 

too strange, too wound-tight, too nervous or untrustworthy or too earnest or not enough, not enough, not enough. rex is a good captain, he is, and i’ll stand to the last in his defense. but he and fives both left the room when i came in, and everyone else stopped talking, looked away.

 

i know i was bad, then.

 

but it still hurts. it’s not even . . . the only time that happened. as a four, climbing into my tube and hearing my batchers suddenly hush, all retracting theirs into the wall until i had done the same, until they thought i was asleep, and then there was the buzz of conversation again. getting to the mess hall first thing in my first unit and setting down my tray on the most desirable table, right with a good view of the holoscreen on a big bolo ball game, and eating at an empty table the whole meal.

 

conversations stopping when i walked by. people straightening up, stopping laughing. eyes following me, and rolled eyes or muttered conversations doing the same.

 

i’m not saying i didn’t deserve it, because there was some part of me that . . . probably did, honestly. not good at the social cues, too quick to follow orders, my spine so ramrod-straight you could use it as a functional ruler.

 

but it certainly didn’t help me feel like i could trust torrent, when events turned in the way that they did. they didn’t trust me, so i would only return the favor.

 

( krell - i thought krell trusted me. he said as much, you know. clapped a hand the size of my ribcage on my shoulder and told me in a serious voice that he was proud of me. that he would rely on my loyalty to help him in the upcoming days, and that he wished there were more men like me in the unit. and - he wasn’t lying, i suppose. but he only wanted that so he could use it. use _me._ i was a convenience. )

 

and i so desperately needed _something_ to hold onto.

 

so i clung onto my orders, built up a box of this-is-what-needs-to-happen. if i was only doing what i was told, i couldn’t give them any new reason to hate me, could i? i was just following orders.

 

of course, there is no such thing as _just_ following orders, and i was so wrong.

 

krell tore down my box, my worldview.

 

i had given up whatever chance i had had with my brothers to defend him, just wanting the one person who had praised me or said my name without spitting it out to be _right,_ and - also to spare myself, i think. if he had been bad all along, what things had i _done,_ sticking to the mantra or the belief that he was correct?

 

but he was just using me.

 

so there was only . . . it wasn’t redemption, not totally. part of it was desperate, white-hot betrayal, like a child’s rage. i needed to do _something_ to get back at krell, something to make my hands stop shaking and to get rid of the feeling that he was completely right about me from the start.

 

but also, i’ve . . . always been a little pragmatic.

 

i was in cuffs anyway.

 

whatever i did, i was going to face court-martial. and i was a first-level sergeant, with the shine not rubbed completely off of me. i was someone who could easily be swept under the rug for the sake of progress. betrayal in the ranks, defective trooper, low cooperative skills - solution, decommission.

 

rex, though - he was around since almost the beginning of the clone wars, and the 501st depended on him. general skywalker, though he’d never admit it, relies on him as well. so too does kenobi, to a lesser extent, and for different reasons. he was a good leader, and he was almost a celebrity figure, with the amount of attention shone on the 501st.

 

the gar couldn’t afford him.

 

it could afford me.

 

i don’t even remember, really, how i got fives’ blaster. but they were all watching krell and rex, and i was no-longer-a-threat. no one would have expected in a million years that i would steal a gun, or that i would shoot the commanding officer i’d stood for so staunchly.

 

rex’s hands were shaking, krell said, and laughed at him.

 

mine didn’t.

 


	8. Chapter 8

i’m hesitant to talk about this one, because i’m still half-sure it’s a hallucination, and i don’t really plan on asking rex to find out whether or not that’s true.

 

but i was in the donor room, and i saw the needle with the paralytic agent coming, and i shut my eyes - because that’s what you learn to do. if you don’t, you might not get a chance to blink again for hours.

 

sure enough, when i tried to move my fingers, i just . . . couldn’t.

 

but i didn’t open my eyes again to a new hole in my chest or something like that - i opened my eyes, and i was alone, in what looked like a viewing room. still strapped down to my bed, oxygen mask tight over my face, monitors strung across and inside me, checking every sign of life and re-checking.

 

there was a window, there, and when i was able to finally, excruciatingly, tilt my head in the direction of it, i could swear that rex was there.

 

he looked sick, almost.

 

i can’t imagine how i looked at the time. i think my ribcage, part of my chest, was still shorn open, and i was malnourished from the rare nutrition injections. and my eyes looked . . . dead. if it weren’t for the droid monitoring my heartbeat and the vague fog appearing and disappearing on my oxygen mask, i think he would’ve taken me for dead.

 

i don’t remember what i thought then, but mostly . . . that it didn’t matter.

 

( and it didn’t, not for another half a year. i was still _there._ )


End file.
